Turn down for what

I'm sitting here in the fading sunlight of New Year's Eve afternoon, wearing a shirt I just picked up from my friend's house. We are in the same Northeast LA Mom Closet Purge Facebook group (and yet not even the most highly specified group on there, I'm sure), and on my way back from sledding Mt. Baldy I popped into her Glendale yard where I picked up this shirt I bought from her, featuring waves and tiny illustrations of women drowning on it. The perfect shirt to wear to the end of 2020. At least, that's what I thought it was when I claimed it by commenting "ME!!!!" on its picture, but now that I'm wearing it I see she has a smile on her face and is placidly treading water. She's just waving, not drowning. An honest mistake, given the circumstances. The shirt faintly smells of my friend, which affords an illicit eroticism only really possible 10 months neck-deep into a the isolation of a global pandemic.

I'm sure many children are currently being professionally assessed for having gone through essential periods of development during the isolation of this global pandemic, but my children aren't two of them. I, however, do the non-professional work of studying them daily - I have no choice but to pay what my mother believes is a suspicious amount of attention to them.

Rowan is a living embodiment of the anal phase. We are all unwilling participants, butt-deep in his anal phase. Freud proposed that attaining control over one's bowels is supposed to be connected to other forms of self-control that come later (cleanliness, orderliness, presumably -- hopefully -- emotional regulation). But in practice, what it looks like is a little boy who has been isolated from all other kids his age for 10 months, who is never allowed to watch any kind of crap TV that would allude to "poop" (pretty much exclusively a Peppa, Pixar, and Magic Schoolbus world over here), and thus has no outside influence of blue humor. This leads to my hypothesis that his fixation with calling me "poopyhead" and saying "poop" every 4 sentences like some kind of fecal-focused Tourette's is...innate. The horror.

Rowan and I were playing "Shopman" the other day - one of his favorite games. He has a wooden cash register and he presses buttons and tells me how many dollars each thing in his room costs. As we were playing, I farted (women do it too) and he doubled over with laughter, then put a serious face on and pointed to his wall.

"MOMMY. Didn't you see the sign in my store? It says NO FARTING!!!!"

I laughed 'til I cried. The imagination...! The indignation...!

Last night, near midnight, deep in REM, he called out "I NEED A WIIIII-IIIIIIPE," which he delights in calling out to us once he's finished in the bathroom. Did you know that you need to wipe a kid's butt for them until they're around 6? (If you want it done, uh, well?)

On Christmas Eve, Rowan opened his first gift. It was a huge space rocket, with astronauts inside. He had seen it in the Lakeshore Learning Catalog (nice marketing, Lakeshore!) and had been talking about it for months. He screamed out with glee "IT'S JUST WHAT I WANTED!!!!" Zoe opened her first gift next - a vintage 80s typewriter toy and gasped. "WHA I WAN-EDD!!!!" she exclaimed. Now, everytime she approaches her typewriter toy, she yells out "WHAT I WANTED!" I think she thinks that's the cumbersome name for the gift. Or maybe it is, really, what she wanted. Her verbal skills are exploding, but not fast enough to explain her ideas of the world to me.

Tonight, I am going to make a creamy pasta, put on a BNWT (that's "Brand New With Tags" for you purge group plebes) pink sequin dress I scored from my mom purge group for $20, toast everything that I hated about this year, dance with Tyler at least once, and fall asleep on the couch before midnight like I have the last 3 New Year's Eves.

Lil' Jon's (age 49) song Turn Down For What is "about" being so present at the party, there is truly nothing worth sobering up for. The song has three credited songwriters and only these three lyrics:

Fire up that loud
Another round of shots
Turn down for what?
Turn down for what?
Turn down for what?
Turn down for what?
Turn down for what?

One lyric per man.
One.
Lyric.
Per.
Man.

In a Reddit AMA, Lil' Jon answered the only thing he would "turn down for" is the police. Covid had not yet made an appearance. Though it appears as Lil' Jon didn't really need to "turn down" for Covid either, as he was a recipient of a PPP loan upwards of $300,000 despite having a net worth of $36 million dollars. I truly don't know how I've ended this newsletter mad at Lil Jon but literally nothing about 2020 went the way I thought it would so it makes sense that we took a sharp left turn here.

Bye, 2020. I love you all. See you on the other side.